OCLC Research Library Partnership Meeting
Melbourne, Australia
2 December 2015
Working with OCLC Research Library Partners on
Researcher & Organisational
Identifiers
Karen Smith-Yoshimura
OCLC Research
Impact
• Funder/government-led
initiatives to ensure value
for the research that gets
funded
• Hard to quantify, track
and classify
• Challenging to get
underlying data to
map the pathway to
impact
One indicator of impact
We initially use bibliometric analysis to look
at the top institutions, by publications and
citation count for the past ten years…
Universities are ranked by
several indicators of academic
or research performance,
including… highly cited
researchers…
Citations… are the best understood and
most widely accepted measure of research
strength.
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Identifiers!!!
• A unique, persistent and public URI associated with
a digital object
• Resolvable globally over networks
• Unambiguous to use, find and identify the resource.
Examples:
• http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n79054099
• isni.org/isni/000000012179088X
• http://viaf.org/viaf/146316977
• wikidata.org/wiki/Q319078 Identify:
Identifiers: Glue for institutions and
funder systems
• Researchers interact with many internal and
external systems
• Machine readable data structure and unique
identifiers are critical for:
o Authentication
o Validation
o De-duplication
• Identifiers enable data to be trusted and re-used
at a network scale
Same name, different people
Conlon, Michael. 1982. Continuously
adaptive M-estimation in the linear model.
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Florida,
1982.
6
One researcher may have many profiles
or identifiers…
(from an email signature block)
Profiles: Academia / Google Scholar / ISNI / Mendeley / MicrosoftAcademic / ORCID /
ResearcherID / ResearchGate / Scopus / Slideshare / VIAF / Worldcat
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Registering Researchers in Authority
Files Task Group Members
• Micah Altman,
MIT - ORCID Board member
• Michael Conlon, U. Florida – PI for VIVO
• Ana Lupe Cristan, Library of Congress – LC/NACO trainer
• Laura Dawson, Bowker – ISNI Board member
• Joanne Dunham, U. Leicester
• Amanda Hill, U. Manchester – UK Names Project
• Daniel Hook, Symplectic Limited
• Wolfram Horstmann, U. Oxford
• Andrew MacEwan, British Library – ISNI Board member
• Philip Schreur, Stanford – Program for Cooperative Cataloging
• Laura Smart, Caltech – LC/NACO contributor
• Melanie Wacker, Columbia – LC/NACO contributor
• Saskia Woutersen, U. Amsterdam
• Thom Hickey, OCLC Research – VIAF Council, ORCID Board
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Stakeholders & needs
Disseminate research
Compile all output
Find collaborators
Researcher
Ensure network presence correct
Retrieve other’s scholarly output to track a given
discipline
Funder
Track funded research outputs
University
Collate intellectual output of their researchers to fulfill
administrator
funder or national mandates, internal reporting
Librarian
Disambiguate names
Associate metadata, output to researcher
Identity management Disambiguate names
system
Link researcher's multiple identifiers
Disseminate identifiers
Associate metadata, output to researcher
Collate intellectual output of each researcher
Aggregator (includes Disambiguate names
publishers)
Link researcher's multiple identifiers
Track history of researcher's affiliations
Track & communicate updates
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Researcher Identifier Information Flow
Key recommendations
• Researcher: Get persistent
identifier (early in career) &
use on all external
communications
• Librarian/University
administrator: Advocate
benefits and reasons for using
and disseminating identifiers
• Need for third-party name
identifier reconciliation
service
http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2014/oclcresearch-registeringresearchers-2014-overview.html
Person Entity Lookup Pilot
• Link related sets of person identifiers and authorities
(e.g., VIAF, ISNI, LC/NACO Authority File)
• Surface WorldCat Person entities, and map to identifiers
for same person
• Seven pilot participants (5 OCLC RLPs):
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
Cornell University
Harvard University
Library of Congress
National Library of Medicine (US)
National Library of Poland
Stanford University
University of California, Davis
OCLC Research Task Force on
Organisations in ISNI
Karen Smith-Yoshimura
Grace Agnew
Christopher Brown
Kate Byrne
Matt Carruthers
Naun Chew
Peter Fletcher
Janifer Gatenby
Stephen Hearn
Xiaoli Li
Marina Muilwijk
Roderick Sadler
John Riemer
Jing Wang
Glen Wiley
Kayla Willey
OCLC Research (leader)
Rutgers University
JISC (UK) (CASRAI)
University of New South Wales
University of Michigan
Cornell University
UCLA
OCLC Leiden (ISNI Assignment Agency)
University of Minnesota
University of California, Davis
University of Utrecht
La Trobe University
UCLA
Johns Hopkins University
University of Miami
Brigham Young University
Examined 13 use
cases; producing
sample records for
each use case
23 recommendations
for the system, for the
ISNI-IA, for users
Search guidelines for
organisations to be
produced
Outreach document
With input from Andrew MacEwan, British Library and Anila Angjeli, Bibliothèque nationale de
France
Organisational IDs: Use cases
• Institutions want to track all their
scholarly output
• Track research groups which may
comprise staff from multiple
institutions
• National assessments reporting
• Track funding and validate affiliation
• Disambiguate researchers’ names
by affiliation
• Correctly identify researchers’
affiliations in publications
Many institutions unaware they already have an identifier assigned
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Special challenges with organisations
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
G
They merge, they split
They acquire/are acquired
They can have multiple departments, schools
Have hierarchies that may change over time
May have multiple hierarchies
Branches in multiple locations or countries
Often unclear when a name change represents
a new organisation
• Different stakeholders’ perspectives
bridging-domains
cross-domain
Text Rights
Trade Sources
Music Rights
Archives and
Museums
Libraries
Encyclopaedias
Researchers & Professional
Granting organisations
Professional Societies
Article databases
Theses databases
ISNI for Organisational Identifiers
Over 500,000 organisations have public ISNIs
• ORCID uses ISNIs for organisations
• Links to and from Virtual International
Authority File (VIAF)
• Links in Wikidata
Ex: Relationships for Research
Groups
Recommendations for ISNI
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Augment relationship types and display
Indicate organisation’s own preferred form of name
Publish ISNI ontology
Add Turtle, N-Triple, JSON-LD as linked data options
Create end user input form for organisations
Create ISNIs for Organisations outreach document
Engage organisations to maintain their public identity
Encourage organisations to collaborate with ISNI
Quality Team to diffuse corrections
Using Research Identifiers
An Overview of UNSW’s practice
UNSW Library
Kate Byrne
Manager, Research Reporting
UNSW Library, UNSW Australia
Email: kate.byrne@unsw.edu.au Twitter: @katecbyrne
Research Identifiers for Individuals
• Support researchers using identifiers including:
Author ID
Profiles
• Use Symplectic Elements to download
publications for researchers based on identifiers
and other search settings.
• Developing strategies for ORCID integrations
with other UNSW systems.
Research Identifiers for Organisations
• Try to keep UNSW records updated in a range
of sources including:
• Undertaking a clean up of UNSW’s records in
ISNI and documenting this as a case study.
• Kate Byrne, Member of OCLC Research Task
Force on Representing Organisations in ISNI
OCLC Research Library Partnership Meeting , Melbourne
2 December 2015
Thank you!
Contact: Karen Smith-Yoshimura
smithyok@oclc.org
@KarenS-Y
SM
Together we make breakthroughs possible.
©2015 OCLC. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Suggested attribution:
“This work uses content from How You Can Make the Transition from MARC to Linked Data Easier © OCLC, used under a
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